Julie R. Andersen:
Living locally, working globally
“The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” – Winston Churchill, 1943
“There is currently not even a vocabulary, much less any systematic data, to help society come to grips with the coming labor-market reality.” – Alan S. Blinder 2006
The Indian offshore worker answering phone calls in Bangalore for a US-based multinational corporation (MNC) has become a symbol of globalization – or what Blinder calls “the coming labor market reality (Blinder 2006:4)”. The most widely known example of this is the 2005 best-seller by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, in which outsourcing and offshoring are called two of “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World” (Friedman 2005:103-127). India is the world’s dominant supplier of offshore labor, and employment in the Indian offshore sector has grown more than 20 percent per year over the last ten years (McKinsey 2005b:35). Why is this the case? And how globalizing – or “flattening” if you will – is offshoring?
To continue reading, download the Full text
